


The Underknown

by MyEvilTwin (ProtoNeoRomantic)



Series: Patch Works [15]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Dark Past, Developing Relationship, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Distance, F/M, Opening Up, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-27 16:31:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2699684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/MyEvilTwin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Buffy's complaints that she barely knows the man she plans to marry threaten to disrupt a glorious bout of marathon sex, Giles eventually has to admit she has a point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Underknown

“Jesus Christ!” Buffy gasped in the grip of at least her third orgasm, “ _you’re_ going to give _me_ a heart attack.”

Giles raised his head from between her thighs, grinning smugly. “The wisdom of experience is good for more than fighting vampires, you know,” he informed her, wrapping her in his arms again. Buffy shifted uncomfortably in his embrace. He sighed. “You don’t like to be reminded,” he surmised.

“That you’ve obviously had more lovers than I’ve had birthdays?” she said, trying not to sound rankled even though she clearly was. “Why wouldn’t I want to be reminded of that?”

“Well I can’t actually stop being forty-seven, you know,” he pointed out, his tone falling somewhere between plaintive and corrective without his really meaning for it to. He had the distinctly unpleasant realization that he was not in fact about to have sexual intercourse for the third time today. Considering what he’d just accomplished on Buffy’s behalf, it made him feel a little bit resentful, which truly didn’t help matters any.

“You could stop pointing it out all the time,” she countered moving from annoyed towards angry. He had the feeling this was about more than a stray comment regarding his experience, at least, with her own record, it had damned well better be.

His mind was assaulted by the repugnant image of Angelus pulling his hard, dripping cock from Buffy’s pussy and shoving it into Jenny’s dead body. Of course, to be entirely fair to Buffy, she hadn’t done or said anything to remind him, but he suddenly didn’t feel like being entirely fair to Buffy. She wasn’t being entirely fair to him.

Disentangling himself from her, he stood, put on his robe and sat down on the edge of the bed again. “Let’s don’t play games,” he said tiredly. “What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t know,” Buffy mumbled in an exasperatingly childish way, wrapping herself in his top sheet and crossing her arms over her knees. He waited. “I really _don’t_ know anything about you,” she said. “About your life, I mean, before we met.”

“Don’t you?” he said a little defensively. Admittedly he hadn’t given her a comprehensive timeline of his major life events, indeed there were still some very significant parts of his history he truly hoped she would never have to learn, but he thought he had shared some pretty damned significant emotional details. His childhood dreams, his youthful rebellion, his musical ambitions, his studies and how he’d felt about them, his sojourn in London, his Slayers. Those weren’t things he shared with just anybody. And, of course, she had dutifully repeated most of it to her little school friends. He’d even come frighteningly close, in an unguarded moment, to confessing to the murder of Randal Watts, though she had misunderstood him, more or less deliberately, he’d thought at the time. It hadn't seemed like she really wanted to know.

“No, I don’t,” she now insisted belligerently. “I hardly know anything.”

“Ask me whatever you like,” he said tersely.

“Just forget it,” she said bitterly.

“I will not,” he countered. “I don’t want to keep having the first half of this conversation for the rest of my life. What is it you want to know that you think I’m not ‘opening up’ enough about?”

“Are your parents dead or alive?” she asked, “What are their names? Who are your closest friends, I mean besides me and Ethan Rayne? Where were you born? Did high school suck for you too or were you fine until you got to college? I mean, you’ve met my parents and my... ex and every guy I’ve ever even tried to do anything with except Tyler. You know everyone I know except my aunts and cousins and I’m sure they’re on your little genealogy chart somewhere—”

Giles sighed. He was starting to realize she had a point. What she didn’t realize was that knowing about those things wouldn’t tell her anything about him that she really would want to know. “Alright!” he said, cutting her off more sharply than he’d meant to. “My father,” he continued more quietly, levelly, but no less tensely, “is Andrew Giles. He is, tragically, still alive. I don’t talk about him much because I don’t talk to him much, though I had that dubious pleasure last night—he wishes us both dead, by the way. I don’t talk about my past much because there is very little in it that I wish to recall. Most of my life I’ve been ... an unhappy person, not intensely, but thoroughly so. My life has been basically empty except for my work. I have a great many acquaintances, including a few who probably think that they are my close friends or were at one time. But you are the only living person I care for very deeply although I am also somewhat fond of Willow, I have to admit.”

He moved towards her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not a matter of not wanting to share my life with you,” he explained, “It’s just that, before I met you, there wasn’t that much of my life that was worth sharing. There were women, and I... cared for some of them, but I didn’t love them. I couldn’t. At the time I thought it was a permanent condition, that I was... incapable of love.” Leaning down to kiss her gently on the lips he added, “thank God, I now know how very, very wrong I was.”

She kissed him back. “Weren’t we... kind of in the middle of something?” she asked, smiling at once apologetically and invitingly. “I mean, that was super awesome for me, but I feel like I ought to give something back.”

He laughed. “Has anyone ever told you you’re too conscientious for your own good?” he asked.

“You certainly never have,” she pointed out.

“Well ‘ought’ is a word you should learn not to use in bed,” he advised, relaxing again. “We’re on the same side. There’s no keeping score.”

"Alright," she persisted cheerfully, running her hand up the inside of his robe and taking a hold of his cock, “I _want_ to do something for you.”

“Well...” he murmured against her throat, “when you put it that way...” He tried, with moderate success, to stuff all of his guilt and regret back into the recesses of his mind, into the place for things to be dealt with at a later time. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose. This was a time for sex.


End file.
